ROCKVILLE, Md. — When the Montgomery County Council voted 6-5 on Tuesday to keep the county’s trash incinerator in Dickerson running for the long term, it chose an option that the county’s own environmental agency projects will cost a typical single-family homeowner almost exactly what County Executive Marc Elrich’s plan to close it would have: $139.87 a year in the base disposal charge in fiscal 2033, against $139.85.
That two-cent gap, in projections the Department of Environmental Protection supplied to the Council and that Council staff published in an Oct. 27 staff report, helps explain why the decision turned less on money than on trucks, landfills and trust in numbers nobody outside the executive branch has seen. An Inquisitor review of the Council’s records, from the first long-haul briefing in July 2025 through Tuesday’s resolution, shows what the vote commits the county to, what it does not, and where the biggest unknowns sit.
The resolution the Council approved supports keeping the Resource Recovery Facility open “for the long term as the County’s primary method for the disposal of solid waste.” It asks the county executive to plan a capital upgrade, to seek bids for a new operating contract to take effect no later than April 2031, when the current contract ends, and to seek bids to dispose of or reuse the incinerator’s ash with attention to “racial equity and social justice.” It also restates support for an in-county food-waste composting plant, for which the Council says it has already appropriated $28 million.
Council President Natali Fani-González and Councilmembers Shebra Evans, Evan Glass, Sidney Katz, Dawn Luedtke and Kate Stewart voted yes. Council Vice President Marilyn Balcombe and Councilmembers Andrew Friedson, Will Jawando, Kristin Mink and Laurie-Anne Sayles voted no, according to Montgomery Community Media.
What households would pay
Every property owner in the county, including in incorporated cities, pays a Base Systems Benefit Charge on the property tax bill, and it is the only solid waste charge that covers the operating and capital costs of disposal, according to the staff report. DEP projected that charge for each sector under three scenarios through fiscal 2053.
| Option | FY27 | FY33 | FY38 | FY43 | FY48 | FY53 | Avg. annual increase, FY27-53 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Keep and upgrade incinerator (adopted) | $89.99 | $139.87 | $169.00 | $202.73 | $243.40 | $291.03 | 4.62% |
| Close it; long-haul with Advanced Waste Processing (Elrich plan) | $89.99 | $139.85 | $170.27 | $205.79 | $247.37 | $300.31 | 4.74% |
| Close it; long-haul without AWP | $89.99 | $121.97 | $149.76 | $182.34 | $220.65 | $268.74 | 4.30% |
Under both plans before the Council, the single-family charge rises about 55% by fiscal 2033 from this year’s $89.99, as either new debt service (for the incinerator) or higher operating costs (for trucking) kicks in. The cheapest path in DEP’s numbers was one the executive did not recommend: closing the plant and trucking waste out without building an Advanced Waste Processing sorting plant, which would put the fiscal 2033 charge at $121.97, about $18 less than either of the two plans before the Council.
Multifamily owners pay far less but see steeper percentage growth: $30 this year, rising to $58.20 in fiscal 2033 under the incinerator option and $58.19 under the executive’s plan. For a medium-sized nonresidential property, measured per 2,000 square feet of floor area, the charge goes from $1,267.93 to $1,898.74 under the incinerator option and $1,898.55 under the executive’s.
| Sector and option | FY27 | FY33 | FY53 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Multifamily, keep incinerator | $30.00 | $58.20 | $121.10 |
| Multifamily, long-haul with AWP | $30.00 | $58.19 | $124.96 |
| Multifamily, long-haul without AWP | $30.00 | $50.75 | $111.83 |
| Nonresidential medium (per 2,000 sq. ft.), keep incinerator | $1,267.93 | $1,898.74 | $3,950.81 |
| Nonresidential medium, long-haul with AWP | $1,267.93 | $1,898.55 | $4,076.84 |
| Nonresidential medium, long-haul without AWP | $1,267.93 | $1,655.83 | $3,648.27 |
Council staff cautioned that the projections “could fluctuate significantly.” Their summary: the options “reflect modest (albeit above typical inflation) average annual increases over the 25-year period” and “are relatively close to each other in level.”
The capital number that moved
The largest swing factor on the incinerator side is the cost of rebuilding a plant that has run since August 1995. DEP’s projections assume debt service on $356 million of upgrades starting in fiscal 2032, based on a consultant’s analysis by Arcadis, bonded over 25 years at 5%, according to the staff report. A year earlier, in its July 2025 briefing, DEP put the figure at $365 million, or about $25.3 million a year in bond payments.
Reworld, which operates the plant, told the Council on Sept. 29 that a different approach could cost $200 million or less. If the upgrade came in near that figure, annual debt service would fall from about $25 million to about $14 million, and Council staff estimated the single-family charge under the incinerator option would drop by about $16 a year.
There is also near-term money already committed. The 2025 contract extension with the Northeast Maryland Waste Disposal Authority, which owns the plant on the county’s behalf, and Reworld includes about $64.5 million in short-term capital work, paid by the county over several years, to keep the plant running safely through April 2031, according to the resolution’s background section. DEP’s rate model for the incinerator option also builds in a $14.5 million project cost in fiscal 2028, an $8.2 million increase in ash disposal costs and the loss of $7.8 million in renewable energy credit revenue.
| Item | Long-haul to landfill | Long-term incinerator contract |
|---|---|---|
| Operating cost per ton | $130 | $110 |
| Capital cost per ton | none | $42 |
| Total per ton | $130 | $152 |
| Total per year | $78.0 million | $91.2 million |
By that early measure, trucking was about $13 million a year cheaper. DEP also showed that its own near-term numbers reversed the ranking in the Arcadis consultant study, which put long-haul by tractor-trailer at $205 a ton and an incinerator retrofit at $124 a ton on a net-present-value basis. DEP said its $130 trucking figure was “based on actual current market rates.” Council staff noted that the long-haul projections assume a 10-year contract with 3% annual increases, and that costs “in year 11 and beyond are unknown.”
The numbers the Council never saw
The Council voted without the bids. Because of county procurement rules, DEP could not share the prices or the landfill locations in vendors’ responses to its September 2025 request for proposals for long-haul trucking, or details of responses to its Advanced Waste Processing solicitation, which were due Oct. 14, the staff report says. DEP’s September presentation said the long-haul responses remain valid only until Nov. 30, 2026, which is why it called November the “optimal” time to decide, according to its Sept. 15 slides.
That gap shaped the vote. Councilmember Evan Glass, who chairs the Transportation and Environment Committee, said in the Council’s statement that the executive’s proposal would put “hundreds of additional diesel trucks” on county roads and pointed to “the unknown costs of the County Executive’s proposal – which have never been shared publicly or privately.” Fani-González told reporters after the vote that, for her, “it was the trucking, sending 80 trucks a day to another state,” MCM reported. Jawando, who voted no and is poised to succeed Elrich as county executive, said he could not decide without those numbers either. “There’s active RFPs for long haul and for advanced waste processing. I don’t know what’s in them,” he told WJLA.
Elrich, who has sought to close the plant since 2018, said he was disappointed and noted that the resolution is “nonbinding,” Montgomery Community Media reported. He said his plan was to sort waste through Advanced Waste Processing first and then truck the remainder, and that the long-haul solicitation requires receiving landfills to capture methane. Unofficial general election results show Elrich will join the Council next term, MCM reported.
Tons, trucks and ash
On waste volumes, DEP’s projections cut both ways. Keeping the incinerator would send about 268,000 tons a year to landfills, mostly ash, compared with roughly 458,000 to 486,000 tons under the executive’s long-haul plan. The long-haul plan with sorting would recycle more, about 586,000 tons in fiscal 2033 compared with about 430,000 under the incinerator option.
| Measure and option | FY33 | FY38 | FY43 | FY48 | FY53 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Landfilled, keep incinerator (incl. ash) | 267,860 | 268,160 | 268,160 | 268,160 | 268,160 |
| Landfilled, long-haul with AWP | 485,728 | 476,867 | 467,494 | 457,628 | 458,249 |
| Recycled, keep incinerator | 430,469 | 484,506 | 514,098 | 537,951 | 552,137 |
| Recycled, long-haul with AWP | 585,569 | 620,530 | 645,162 | 664,212 | 671,793 |
DEP estimated that trucking would add about 80 tractor-trailer trips a day into the Shady Grove Transfer Station in Derwood and 80 out; Reworld put the figure at about 100 round trips. The station already handles about 1,200 commercial trucks and 1,000 residential vehicles a day, and a March 2026 traffic study rated the Shady Grove Road and Route 355 intersection at level of service F in the morning peak, according to the staff report. Katz said in the Council statement that rail “is a key reason why I voted to keep the Resource Recovery Facility open.”
The incinerator generates up to 52 net megawatts, about 455,000 megawatt-hours a year, and recovers about 13,500 tons of metal annually, the staff report says. It exceeded permit limits for dioxins and furans in September and December 2025; Reworld made repairs, later tests showed compliance, and an October 2026 EA Engineering health study commissioned by DEP found exposures “approximately 20 to 300 times below” its cancer and noncancer thresholds.
The ash goes to the Old Dominion Landfill in Henrico County, Va., in a community in the 84th percentile nationally for concentration of people of color and the 81st for low-income residents, according to the Arcadis report cited by Council staff. The current ash contract can be ended without fees on 12 months’ notice, but DEP found that moving the ash elsewhere would take a long-term contract at potentially higher cost.
What happens next
The resolution sets a direction, not a budget. It asks the executive to bring an upgrade project as an amendment to the fiscal 2027-2032 capital program, and the Council press release says the plan “would be implemented once capital funding is submitted, reviewed and approved.” DEP’s own timeline said the latest point to decide on an upgrade and on moving ash disposal was May 2028. That work will fall to a new executive who voted against the resolution and a Council that will include the outgoing executive who opposed it.
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